Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

https://keepgoingpod.com/p/tech-crunched-how-the-go-to-site

by jdbiggs • 2 years ago

110 56 2 years ago

They still have a lot of market power. To get placed in them you need to go through a marketer with contacts and that costs quite a bit of money. They publish all this junk stuff but it's just to get more eyeballs. Centralization of this stuff means that these gatekeepers become more valuable. A real pity.

karolist• 2 years ago

do they really matter anymore? I remember them from the pre 2010 days but even then it seemed to me like linkedin for startups just without the social network thing, i.e. suits posting boring things. These days I can't remember clicking an article linking there ever.

dantyti• 2 years ago

It doesn’t matter, but companies can still get something out of it. For instance, if you’re trying to look more credible, you could share and pin your oped, quote or brand mention from TC on social media. This might fool someone who’s just glancing at your profile to figure out if a company is legit. No clicks involved and all it takes is for the person not to know how much TC has gone downhill.

Having your brand linked to (or even just mentioned) on sites like TC is also something seo spammers swear by too.

calmbonsai• 2 years ago

Even before the acquisition, any TC article was viewed as a "negative signal" in my circles. They were a classic pay-to-play non-journalism rag for generating PR spin or, worse, cabal "take-down" pieces. They absolutely deserve all the irrelevance they've earned.

PeterCorless• 2 years ago

If there was one thing the article was missing, it was to differentiate the power of something data-driven like Crunchbase versus the articular content of TechCrunch.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

But in the end, TC is no longer relevant... Here’s the saddest thing: it should be. Startups haven’t gone away. Any media startup could essentially recreate Arrington’s model and start selling little ads while profiling startups. Fun can be had poking holes in Valley blowhards, and there could be reams of content to be had by telling people how to be successful in startup land. But TC won’t do that anymore.

The author seems nostalgic for the good old days, when TechCrunch was a real news outlet that spoke truth to power, and so on. I guess I only ever remember it as a blog that was close enough to Silicon Valley to act as a hype lever, multiplying the force of hype for the latest Silicon Valley horseshit by broadcasting it to the world. The article confirms that was at least part of what they did, but I guess he believes they also did some good things. I wasn't ever a regular reader, and may have that wrong.

savanaly• 2 years ago

"One man's trash..." and all that.

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

I remember noticing years ago (say 2008) that TechCrunch was heavy on stories about Facebook and Google long after either company ceased to be a startup.

I was told back then that this is a function of their readership which is not really interested in startups and is more interested in FAANG or whatever you call it these days.

I post quite a few "Company A has raised $B million to do C" articles to HN and I find that, despite HN being about startups, not a lot of people care if they haven't heard of company A before. It puzzles me a lot because if you are interested in starting a startup or working for a startup or selling things to a startup this is the foundation for your business intelligence.

unyttigfjelltol• 2 years ago

Founders of that era were hoping to sell their ownership to the FAANG, so it makes perfect sense a startup-oriented outlet would cover FAANG, maybe with a little too much enthusiasm.

throwup238• 2 years ago

The average person probably knows Techcrunch from the HBO show since the Disrupt conference was a major plot point. Like you said they were never a bastion of journalism.

BenoitP• 2 years ago

Ah the good old days of Michael Arrington. TC was my gateway drug to silicon valley produced news, including HN.

He had the habits of pulling stunts like showing up at meetings he wasn't invited to. And the ways of a savant lawyer at extracting information from people. I've always suspected he knew well in advance about the iPad; and he convinced investors to back him up to produce an equivalent product, partnering with a laptop company. The product got shipped, only just at 8-10 times the weight of the iPad though.

He'd have made a fantastic COO, or investor relationship manager IMHO if he had not chosen to do TechCrunch. I hope he's doing well at his cryptofund.

jrhizor• 2 years ago

It looks like Michael Arrington agrees https://x.com/arrington/status/1812902866899902857

marban3• 2 years ago

You could say that about any tech blog of that era—RRW, Mashable, GigaOm, etc. The point is that tech has thankfully grown up, and they lost it to Bloomberg, NYT, FT, et al.

PaulHoule3• 2 years ago

I'd say NYT and FT have very little coverage of startups and Bloomberg has occasional startups. Techcrunch is still the leader for stories like "Company A has raised $B million to do C" which my friends and I are very interested in when we are interested in C. (e.g. where are you going to find a job doing C? what are the prospects for your own startup idea around C?)

marban3• 2 years ago

Venturebeat does most of this.

ghaff2• 2 years ago

There was probably a more tight-knit/closely-connected (?) startup ecosystem back in the day when TC was a thing. Today it's probably too varied and large and has too many subsets.

Techcrunch is still the leader for stories like "Company A has raised $B million to do C" which my friends and I are very interested in when we are interested in C.

I guess. On the other hand that's the sort of inside baseball news most people I know have zero interest in.

wallflower• 2 years ago

Wow! Techmeme is still around!

https://techmeme.com/

marban3• 2 years ago

And so is upstract.com (fka PopUrls)

cddotdotslash• 2 years ago

I hate seeing Techmeme links because it always guarantees I'll need to click yet another link before getting to the original URL. It's like a useless middleman.

Kye• 2 years ago

It made more sense before the blogosphere collapsed and you would see lots of unique takes from independent blogs instead of links to a few short posts on a handful of enormous social media sites plus maybe posts from the biggest still surviving sites.

brigadier132• 2 years ago

White dude CEOs like Brian Armstrong and Jesse Powell came out hard against DEI efforts and even paid employees to leave, which led, incidentally, to morale at their companies so low it could be measured in millisieverts. But they were making money, baby, so it was all good.
So, by all measures, Alexandr Wang’s MEI bullshit was just that, bullshit

Amazing, I don't think he gets it. His rant about white dudes while the person being critiqued is an Asian dude. You don't have to think hard about why Asian people might value merit in a system that previously penalized them for their race?

Haje argued that Wang was a wang.

Comments like this really highlight the hypocrisy and lack of actual principle behind the stances of these people.

PedroBatista• 2 years ago

Even by Bay Area standards, the last decade and a half has been beyond obscene by the amount and level of douchebags created and their most asinine takes and sins.

As time passes like in everything we tend to forget the bad things and imagine the past with rose colored glasses when the borrowing rates were essentially zero.

But then you interact with one of "those key people" from that era, and dear Lord.. your soul exits the chat.

Btw, Tech Crunch is and always was almost from the start a cesspool of snakeoil salesmen with zero scruples and a shitty pseudo PR firm. Everybody knew this and "everybody" with VC money played the game.

baxtr• 2 years ago

Then there are the hard working people commuting every day to their jobs optimizing the products we use daily.

There are many companies like that in the valley too. They just don’t get the attention they deserve.

That’s one of the reasons I miss Steve Jobs. He delivered so much value but could also play the attention game so well.

brandur• 2 years ago

Also notable that the author didn't link Haje's (the TechCrunch person who railed against Alexander Wang) actual writing because he knew it doesn't make either Haje, or his argument in favor of Haje, look good. So, here it is:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240628212036/https://techcrunc...

The Pulitzer Prize-worthy content in question:

I would invite him — and those supporting them — to fuck all the way off. You misunderstand me. You thought I wanted you to fuck only partially the way off. Please, read my lips. I was perfectly clear: Off you fuck. All the way. Remove head from ignorant ass, then fuck all the way off.

This is the quality of writing whose loss the author is arguing is why TechCrunch has lost its global relevance. A perfect inversion of the truth if I've ever seen one.

rurp2• 2 years ago

Yeah that was a weird pivot in the article. I enjoyed it up to that point, but the strident defense of that terrible Haje article seemed out of left field; like I'd switched to reading Twitter for a couple paragraphs. Of all the things that has hurt TC, getting rid of Haje for that article seems like it should be at the very bottom of the list.

unsupp0rted• 2 years ago

He doesn't get it. Any time one starts a sentence with "[Skin/ethnicity color] dude CEOs", that's a dead giveaway.

In his world because it's "white" it's punching-up/innocuous.

TruthWillHurt• 2 years ago

For a moment I thought it was about HN.. for some reason.

swyx• 2 years ago

DEI / MEI culture war aside:

After years of corporate ownership, culminating in Yahoo’s sale to private equity firm Apollo, TC has become a milquetoast site focused on big raises specially placed by expensive PR people and random tech news that has been neutered into pablum. The current editorial structure, controlled by one or two old-guard TCers and a lot of older editors hired by editor Connie Loizos.

sad to realize that this is exactly what i was feeling about TC in the last 3-4 years. is it salvageable?

jdbiggs• 2 years ago

author here: probably not.

oaththrowaway• 2 years ago

It was lost as soon as AOL merged with Yahoo. The leadership of the entire "Oath" suite of companies was a joke

nuz• 2 years ago

I'd like to continue on the narrative here but the truth is kind of that tech itself hasn't really had much exciting things to report on in the ~2017 to now period. If I were in their shoes I'd probably switch reporting to anti tech as well.

snats• 2 years ago

Deeptech is going crazy, all of the AI boom is pretty much an obvious subject if you are in media, and finally you still have your usual gossip. You still have a lot of eyes

forgetfulness• 2 years ago

Since then it's been dominated by advancements in generative AI, which mostly appeals the get-rich-quick types that were also into cryptocurrency speculation. At least generative AI does produce _something_ today, at the cost of tremendous amounts of electricity and pushing humans out of office jobs to food preparation and delivery.

After all this proletarization of knowledge workers is normalized, hopefully the new AI Robber Barons will leave us some sick public libraries or some equivalent, at least.

Yawrehto• 2 years ago

at the cost of tremendous amounts of electricity

And the climate. And water. So much water. (Some good reads on that: https://grist.org/technology/the-overlooked-climate-conseque..., https://grist.org/technology/surging-demand-data-guzzling-wa..., and https://themarkup.org/hello-world/2023/04/15/the-secret-wate....)

some sick public libraries

They won't. One major thing AI does is get you from a question to an answer, like a search engine. But here's the thing: Libraries also do that, and they're good at it (the large ones at least). They do so for free, legally, without using anyone's stuff without consent, without selling your data, and without nearly as big climate concerns. They're a threat to AI (or would be if they weren't already crippled by search engines), and AI doesn't want to keep them around.

mudil• 2 years ago

Speaking as an MD, as someone who founded a medical technology blog in 2004, and closed it this year.

Not only TC collapsed but the whole blogosphere collapsed. The independent journalism has collapsed.

When Google and others take your content, crawl your site, store your data, use it and resuse it to serve targeted ads on memes, the journalism becomes a useless pursuit without salary. Google destroyed the internet.

It's a tragedy for whole society.

tootie• 2 years ago

Yeah, this exactly. VCs fueled by low interest rates sold the world on free content forever and when the well dried up, all the legacy businesses that wanted to invest in quality and human capital were left holding the bag. It isn't just independent journalism that's suffering. Local journalism and even former stalwarts like Newsweek or Forbes have gone to pot.

ghaff2• 2 years ago

Well, it wasn't just VCs. A lot of traditional mainstream media felt that they had to do something. A few like the NYT and The Economist arguably had strong enough brands to come out the other side with subscriptions. Maybe Bloomberg Business Week and some smaller pubs. Forbes, post Malcolm, sold their soul for clicks. A ton of others aren't quite as sad but bad enough.

Scoundreller• 2 years ago

I truly believe that Google de-ranked most blogs. Used to be they would put a mix of results (some blogs, even small time ones, some forums, some official sites) so that you’d probably get whatever you were looking for on pg1.

Now it’s far more corporate.

I probably shouldn’t have ranked as high as I did on my Joe Blow blog with better directions to my local passport office or phone numbers for my bank (because the bank’s website sucks and does anything but give you their phone number). But I could often make 1st, 2nd or 3rd result until I didn’t. My content was objectively more useful.

For a while, every Google update that people complained about just bumped me higher. Oh well.

rurp2• 2 years ago

I don't think it's even in question that Google de-ranked blogs and other independent sites. I remember Eric Schmidt talking about this publicly back when he was running things, saying that they were intentionally up-ranking larger corporate sites. Google had been the main way that blogs got new readers, then Google took that traffic away. It's no wonder that ecosystem has mostly died off, and Google deserve most of the blame for why the public internet has become such a bland corporate-controlled environment.

wkcheng• 2 years ago

This may be why things like Substack and Beehiiv have taken off. The only way to combat reposting through Google is to deliver content directly to email inboxes before it gets ranked and reposted.

There is something additional at play with TechCrunch, though. Recently I feel like they haven't been posting as many articles that are about smaller startups as they used to. They tend to post more about Google, Nvidia, Intel, etc. I find myself reading it less and less because it's mostly news that you can also find elsewhere.

encom• 2 years ago

the whole blogosphere collapsed

And hopefully with it, the word "blogosphere".

znq• 2 years ago

Curious, what are good alternatives to what TC used to be?

julianeon4• 2 years ago

This article makes a great point towards the end that I'll repeat here:

There should be another TC-like site reporting on startups now. Specifically there should be a news site about startups that has some critical distance from those startups - at least enough that it doesn't directly financially benefit from my perception of the companies that it's reporting on.

Example, by analogy: I'm interested in news about Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta. But I don't want to read their PR releases. I want someone to do some filtering on that, because there's too much filler there for me to review it daily.

This seems to be a really hard thing to do right! There's a balance in the reporting that it takes a lot of intelligence and finesse to do right, which is why it seems media co's can't do it forever.

One issue is that it can be too adversarial and too clickbait-y. That is a problem.

But the other issue - and this is the problem afflicting the solutions that I've seen - is the opposite. Too far in the pocket of the companies it's reporting on, and friendly to the point of sleepiness, like sitting in on all-hands you're not being paid to attend. A news site that might as well be called "our venture fund and why the companies we invest in are awesome" isn't it.

I don't think there's a site filling this void right now. TC did a decent job at it, for a while, but there should be a new contender.

jmole• 2 years ago

The information?

But the vibe there is more WSJ and less buzzfeed

julianeon4• 2 years ago

Great answer. The Information is solid and does fill this void.

I think the economics of it are such that it's a premium product and not as accessible as TC, which is why I didn't think of it. But in every other respect, it fits.

silisili• 2 years ago

I like the idea in concept, but feel you'd run into the same problem 'fair' reviewers run into: if you get too negative for a company's liking, or don't say the given talking points, they'll blacklist you. So other sites get the newest scoops, the convention invites, etc.

Why do you think almost every 'top' reviewer on YouTube is so positive on nearly everything? Because the ones who gave fair reviews quit getting early/free access.

julianeon4• 2 years ago

I hadn't considered that: in an age of social media, this kind of review gets a lot harder.

renewiltord3• 2 years ago

There’s no way to do that in mass market form. If you are too balanced you’ll get torn to bits. No one likes that guy. People like to talk about the media but it’s really responding to audience preferences.

For instance, in your case, would you want each article about Google to start with two pages of argumentation on “how terrible their privacy practices are”? Because that’s what the audience wants.

You can have that while the screaming hordes outside yell “paywall?! Paywall?!” But it’s not going to be free like TechCrunch.

julianeon4• 2 years ago

Sadly I think that's the truth.

ilamont• 2 years ago

Legend has it that at one point an irate German entrepreneur spit on Mike at an event, leading us all to have a profound distrust of humanity.

This wasn't a legend. Arrington talked or wrote about it, I can't remember where. Maybe in one of his essays explaining why he was going to Hawaii to take a months-long break. He said he was at a conference and someone came up to him and spit in his face, and then walked away without saying a word. As I recall, he regarded the incident as a turning point that prompted soul-searching about what he was doing.

Traffic was paramount and ad sales were vital, so niche startup posts, posts that everyone once read but were now read by the company, lost their value. Over time, the value of a traditional TC story waned.

Nearly every newsroom has struggled with this for more than 15 years. The only media orgs that have been able to escape or partially escape the black hole of clickbait are by massive scale/subscriber counts (NYT, FT) or those funded by sales at some other profitable branch of the company, such as Bloomberg (terminals).

Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

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